The Salvaging of Civilisation

Extract

Civilisation is in peril. Press and pulpit proclaim the fact. Politicians make its salvation their appeal to popular suffrage, and communists hail its fall as an unqualified blessing.

Of what nature is the menace to civilisation? Politicians call it Bolshevism, and communists call it the Class War. The politician and his party papers see the finger of Bolshevism in Ireland, in the German Reparations difficulty and in every industrial dispute at home and abroad. All labour members of Parliament, all trade unionists, all co-operators, all socialists are Bolshevists and, ipso facto, enemies of the existing order of society. With equal intolerance, communists regard all who compromise with society and its institutions as lacking in class-consciousness and enemies of the proletariat.